Mr. Clarinet

surface was unusually smooth and the wheels seemed to glide along it, the car's engine emitting a soothing hum. The stars had begun to appear in the sky, the galaxies so close they resembled rhinestone clouds. The whole way there Huxley had been calm and assured. Not once had he even asked Max what he planned to do with him. It had occurred to Max that they weren't going to find Charlie Carver at all, that Huxley was taking him to the place where he'd cut up Beeson and Medd. If that's what it was, it wouldn't happen to him. He wouldn't let it. He'd kill Huxley at the slightest hint of something going wrong. Not that he really believed Huxley had that in mind at all. Huxley had lived most of his life seeking revenge for his sister and for himself. Now he had it he didn't really care what came next.

'You were the one I always wanted for this job,' Huxley said. 'I'd followed your trial, every day. I read up about you. I really respected what you did. I felt like you were on my side, like if we'd ever meet up one day you'd be one person who'd at least understand where I was coming from, what I'd been through.'

'People feel the same way about their favorite rock stars.' Max punctured his bubble. 'Take it a little further and it's called stalking.'

'Guess your life's made you a hardass too, huh?' Huxley laughed.

'My life's been a failure,' Max said. 'Any way you look at it. Doing what I did made no difference?except to me. It didn't bring back the victims, it didn't turn back the clock and give them back their innocence. It didn't help their parents, their families. Not in the long run. Closure's bullshit. You never recover from that kind of loss. You take your tears with you to the grave.

'And as for me?I lost the only genuinely good thing I ever had. My wife. She died when I was in prison. I never got to hold her again, touch her, kiss her, be with her?never got to tell her how much I loved her?all because of the life I'd led. All that 'good' I thought I was doing, it added up to one big zero. It put me in jail. If that ain't failure, I don't know what is.'

Max looked through the windshield, into the darkness.

'How come Gustav let Allain do the hiring?' he asked.

'He didn't. That dinner you went to? That was your interview with Gustav. If he hadn't liked you, you would've been on the next plane back to Miami,' Huxley said.

'That ever happen?'

'No. Allain and I chose well.'

They drove on in silence for a while. Max holstered the Glock.

'Tell me about Eddie Faustin?'

'Using him was my idea too,' Huxley said.

'How did you turn him? I thought he was loyal to the old man.'

'Everyone has their price.'

'What was Eddie's?'

'Francesca. She was Faustin's wet-dream girl. I told him if he helped us out he could have her?through his bokor?Madame Leballec. She was a good friend of my mother's,' Huxley explained.

'Hold up,' Max said. 'You told Mrs. Leballec to tell Eddie he could 'have' Francesca? So she was a fake?'

'Yes and no. She has some powers, but she's a black magician?a witch. Lying's part of their repertoire,' Huxley said. 'She has many believers.'

'So, when we went to see her and Eddie's 'spirit' told us to go to the temple?'

'?where you met me, and I gave you the box that had Eddie's address in it, where you found the videotape.'

'You'd paid her to show us the way?'

'Yes. And, by the way, she's no cripple either?and Philippe's her lover, not her son. And please don't ask me how she tricked the seance out, 'cause I don't know,' Huxley said and then he laughed.

'Shit!' Max said. 'OK?back to Faustin.'

'Eddie was deeply troubled. Paranoid that all the bad stuff he and his brother did when they were Macoutes was catching up with him. He was visiting Madame Leballec on a monthly basis to get his fortune read.

'And that's where we came in. Allain paid Madame Leballec a lot of money to give Faustin a tailor-made fortune?one where he got the girl of his dreams and lived happily ever after.

'She told Faustin that a man he'd never met was going to approach him about a top-secret job. She told him he had to do it if he wanted his dreams to come true.'

'So you met him?'

'Yeah, one night outside the taffia shack where he went. When he heard what I was proposing he didn't want to go along with it. He rushed off back to Madame Leballec. We'd anticipated that. She upped the ante. She persuaded Faustin that Charlie Carver was really a spirit who had escaped from Baron Samedi and had possessed the boy. The boy needed to be handed back to Baron Samedi's envoy?namely me.'

'Bullshit!'

'He fell for it.'

'Christ!'

'Faustin was so stupid it was practically a talent. Factor in the superstition that everything that goes bump in the night is some madcap spirit and you've got the perfect fanatic.'

'OK, tell me about the kidnapping. Things didn't go according to plan, did they?'

'In what way?' Huxley asked.

'The riot,' Max replied.

'No, that was planned. Faustin had a lot of enemies. We paid some of them to be where we told Faustin to be. He thought I was going to walk up to the car and take the child away.'

'The nanny?Rose?died.'

'Faustin killed her, we didn't.'

'Did you intend for Faustin to die?'

'Yes.'

'Who took Charlie?'

'I did. I was in disguise, among the crowd attacking the car. I grabbed the boy, disappeared with him.'

They went through a small village of thatched huts. Max saw no signs of life whatsoever, except for a small, tethered goat, caught in the headlights, munching on a bush.

'So, who was Mr. Clarinet? Carver or Codada?'

'They both were. Codada filmed the kids and stole them to order. Carver stole their souls and sold their bodies.'

'What about that symbol? That bent cross with the broken-off arm?'

'You didn't recognize that?'

'No.' Max shook his head.

'Manet's Le Fifre. Remember that painting? The soldier boy with the flute? It was the organization's badge, how they recognized each other. There was one hanging in the club you met Allain in. He sat you where you'd notice it. There was one in Codada's office, when Allain took you to meet him. There was another in Noah's Ark, right outside Eloise Krolak's classroom. There's one hanging in every club. The symbol is an outline of the painting. It was meant to be subliminal,' Huxley said and chuckled. 'Maybe it was too subliminal.'

'You could've made this easier, just left me an anonymous note telling me who to look for.'

'No,' Huxley said. 'It couldn't be that easy. You'd have wanted to know who was behind the note. You would have found us.'

'But couldn't you have just blown the whistle on the Carvers?'

'Here? You'd have better luck whispering to the deaf. And you know what happened in Canada. That wasn't the way it was going to work,' Huxley said.

They continued in silence. Max tried not to think about the way he'd been played from the very beginning to the very end, and tried to focus instead on the positive outcome, that he would soon be freeing Charlie from his captors and reuniting him with his real parents. That was the main thing, the important thing, the only thing. That was why he'd come here.

He didn't know what he was going to do about Huxley.

'What about Allain?' Max asked. 'Where'd he go?'

'Your guess is as good as mine. He never told me. We settled up and that was the last I saw of him. I don't expect he'll ever be found.'

'So you did get money out of it?'

'Yeah, sure. I didn't want to go back to preying on horny faggots,' Huxley said. 'We're not too far now.'

Max checked his watch. It had turned eight p.m. In the distance he could see the lights of a town. He guessed they were close to the Dominican Republic.

'Unlike you, Max, I have no regrets. Mine might have been a poor life, a miserable life even?but it was my life. Not theirs?mine. And it was my sister's life too. Our lives. Ours to keep, ours to live. They took it from us. They took her from me. So, I took it all from them.

'Allain didn't give a shit about those kids. He was horrified and disgusted by what his father was doing, sure, but you know, it was always really just about him. Not anyone else. He just wanted to rip his dad off, piss in his face and steal his money. He used to